Set the machine on 'dough' cycle. When it is ready, form into approx 16 rolls in a greased 9 x 13 cake pan. Let rise 30 min. in a warm place. Bake at 400 for 19 minutes. I use stoneware so adjust accordingly.

Tuesday, November 29, 2011

Though it
isn’t completed, I am satisfied with the word count. I broke through several
levels of angst, head banging, and general malaise to get to this point. A
monumental achievement, I assure you.

First
paragraph. Tell me if it is a hooker, er, um, hooks you.

His lazy strides across the mall caught my attention. Like he had time to
kill and everyone else could wait at his leisure. Most galling was how people
moved out of his way without disruption. No glares. No commotion.

I don’t
think the word count will go to 100K but if it does, I will have enough
storyline and volume to fiddle with now.

I signed up
even though Ambition rolled its eyes. This path was very familiar.

I snarled,
dug deep, and cut back on goofing off the intensive research and wrote
through several sticking points in my manuscript. My intended antag slapped me
upside the head and told me to look elsewhere for the mastermind of all mayhem.

To make a
short story long, I had to buy a ticket to ride the roller coaster. Or muscle
my way in since the Muse had left me. Once again I turned to my treadmill to clear and
focus my mind. See here for an earlier post regarding this phenomenon.

Wednesday, November 16, 2011

My mom said the word ‘hate’ is like a curse in the eyes of God. I rarely
use the word when describing ‘things’ let alone humans.

So you could say the word bothers me.

Why do people hate Twilight?

All of us have opinions. I understand the vegetarian’s viewpoint
regarding eating meat and agree with them to a point. But I am a carnivore. No
need for either of us to get huffy just because we don’t agree.

With that in mind, there are books that I didn’t care for, the writing
and the storyline:

Water for Elephants

The Notebook

Interview with a Vampire

The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo

There are books and authors I love:

Lord of the Rings

The Kingkiller Chronicles

Mary Stewart

Jim Butcher

Kevin Hearne

Patricia Briggs

Patrick Rothfuss

And

Twilight by Stephenie Meyer.

Why the vitriol against Twilight and the author?

Reason #1: Terrible writing

Yeah, debut authors should be perfect in every way *smarmy much?*

Reason #2: Poor role model

Seriously?! Since when do writers fret over role models? Pick up any YA
and show me a good role model that fits everyone's concept of the word. This premise
leaves me scratching my head and makes me wonder if they are reading the same
books I am.

Reason #3: The movies are stupid.

*smacks forehead* Clearly the person who said this isn’t a reader and depends on the big screen to review books. Read Gone With the Wind for perspective.

Reason #4: Bella is moody

*gasp* ReaLLY? A teen that is moody? OMGosh, how unrealistic.

I read Twilight three years ago and my world changed for the better. I
quietly indulge my love for the books. Why do people loathe the books to such a
degree that they froth at the mouth? Popularity might be the answer. Or the
lobsters in a bucket simile. One lobster crawls to the rim and the others pull
it down to their level.

At any rate, the word ‘hate’ and acidic comments thrown at the novels
make no sense to me. If you don’t care for the books, great. I didn’t like
A Discovery of Witches either but that doesn’t mean I don’t think ANYONE should
read it or would enjoy it.

Am I being unreasonable?

(btw, I don't care for the movies either but dang, that RPatz is breathtaking)

Sunday, November 13, 2011

Golden Blood by Melissa Pearl is about a teen girl afflicted
with more than the usual high school angst of friends, classes, and that cute
boy in the front row. She is a time traveler. And sometimes missions get in the
way.

Ms. Pearl debut novel is YA and a reading treat. She kept me
guessing until the end, setting up conflicts and mysteries that bounced my
emotions around. As the MC grows in character, she gets the proverbial rug pulled
out from under her. Great storyline.

I enjoyed the detailed world-building Ms. Pearl created.
With layers of intrigue and what-ifs, I dropped into her alternate universe without
struggling to understand.

Wednesday, November 9, 2011

When the antag in my wip claimed, “I am innocent,” I had much to consider.

My new antag is less evil but this is worse for the MC because the
villain’s goals are righteous. There are no gray areas; no compromise or
empathy.

Composing the history behind the antag’s resolve became the untended
consequence. A good thing actually since different paths opened for me to take.

A big wow, creative-wise.

Another unintended consequence was not so good.

Several weeks ago, we hired a roofer to install new shingles on our
house.
Last night we had our first measurable rainfall.
This morning we woke to *major* leaks resulting in damage to sheetrock,
lighting fixtures.

Before the roofing job, our roof did not leak.

The unintended consequence? The act to forestall a problem
caused the event to occur.

Tuesday, November 8, 2011

At first, the totals may give a dismal picture. Two thousand words isn't fancy dancing. But I have an excuse. My antag said he didn’t do it.

Humph. That’s what they all say.

Then the MC refused to play ball. She also said he didn’t do it and
everything changed.

The path shifted. Re-writes and
much research became the norm.

The bright light hit me in the excerpt below:

“Good Lord,” I said. “What are you, a vampire
wannabe?”

I wondered how
I’d noticed him at all. Dressed in black from the ground up, boots, loose
slacks, and a billowy shirt. It gaped at his throat and for a moment, my
imagination carved punctures on his neck.

A swift look down then back at me. Collin’s brow
scrunched into a frown. “A what? Vampire? No.”

And for a moment, his startled eyes were huge,
startled. The smart-ass man, furious and impatient with life dropped from his
expression. “I just like black,” he said simply.

“It’s a good look,” I blurted.

His mouth dropped. We stared at each other, me
confused. And him…well, I couldn’t tell what Collin was thinking. It was as if
I had slapped him with a dead fish, the surprise on his face was there for me
to see. The term is ‘discombobulated’, I believe.

“What are you playing at?” he said low.

I have the ending written. It is clear in my mind. That didn’t change.
But now I have to join the three sections: the main MS, the ending, and now the
new antag.

Tuesday, November 1, 2011

Shamira has a knack for controlling animals. For her, being
a whisperer and farrier doesn’t mean only voice and body language. Her thoughts
alone master vicious dogs, frantic horses. For Sham, controlling animals isn’t
hard. Dominating humans even less so.

Of Wishes Made began in
December 2010. A Whole Eleven Months ago. And I am 15-20 K words from the end.

Why it isn’t finished:

I was busy.

Sick.

Aliens sucked me into their
mother ship and took me to a dimension without Word doc.

Although I am not participating
in Nano with the blog chain’s help I hope to complete Wishes by December 1.

Or return to the other
dimension where chocolate and Doritos have no calories.

Sunday, October 30, 2011

“We decided that every Tuesday during the month of November,
participants in the blog chain will post their updates. You can tell us about
your novel, post excerpts, complain that all your characters are already dead
and it's only chapter 11, whatever. Go wild.”

It is an aid to Nano, National Novel Writing Month, but should
be of interest to any writer. No need to be a participant of Nano just gotta be
a writer. And since you are reading this, you are qualified. LOL.

Go check it out and sign up. This business needs good people and
Charity and Elizabeth are two of the finest.

Friday, October 28, 2011

What it has is sound. A crash in the night, loud knocking, that trapped
sensation, and human reactions. Of terror, horror, and madness.

It is The Haunting, the 1963 version of the novel by Shirley Jackson,
The Haunting of Hill House.

The most chilling line comes after something begins banging on the
bedroom door that Nell, the protagonist, shares with another woman. She reaches
out to take the other woman’s hand as the crashing at the door continues,
seeming to ebb, and then returning with an echoing boom.

Nell complains that the woman is crushing her hand. When the room falls
silent, Nell sees the other woman isn’t close enough to have been the one
holding her hand in the dark.

“God! God! Whose hand was I holding?”

Ms. Jackson wrote outstanding literature including The Lottery and The
Daemon Lover. To mix it up, she also wrote Life Among the Savages, about raising kids in a old house, one
of the most humorous books I’ve ever read.

Thursday, October 27, 2011

We stood at a juncture a ‘T’ in a hallway of an old building we were
remodeling. The floors were a terrazzo stone pattern, mottled gray, and the
walls newly painted ivory.

The building had stories of haunting, of dark-robed ladies gliding down
the halls and of cold winds in the tunnels as if a specter had rushed by in a
hurry.

But those were just stories and I shrugged them off. I loved them of
course as I love any fiction but that was all.

As we talked that day at the T juncture, three others and I, a woman
screamed.

Imagine a throat-tearing sound from a horror flick. Then place it in an
empty building.

I flew down the hall that faced us. Without a doubt, the woman in
trouble was right in front of me behind the closed door in the hallway. But
when I jerked the door open, no one was there. Confused, I looked around and
saw I was alone. None of my co-workers had followed.

All of us heard the scream and all of us reacted. For me, the sound came
from the hallway directly in front. At the same time, two of my co-workers ran
down the right hand hall sure the scream came from that direction. But no one was there.

The other co-worker ran down the left hallway. Empty.

The four of us had occupied the same area. All of us heard the kind of scream
that turns guts to water. All of us swore it came from a different area.

Dumped. What a word to describe the end of a relationship. And just as
I finished wrapping his Christmas gift in red foil paper. Too late to return
it. No one wanted an engraved wristband with someone else’s name on it anyway.

A storm roiled the clouds over my house and miles away lightning stabbed
the earth as I stood under the porch roof watching.

Relationships never worked out for me. They blew up at the worst times.
Now, once again, I was alone. Anger mixed in equal measures with hurt.

Why can’t I find that special person, the one meant for me?

The desperate plea crushed me. I squeezed my eyes shut.

A flash of light clawed at my eyes then a blast of thunder followed by
crackling. Like plastic scrunched together, a sure sign of a close lightning
strike.

And then a voice inside my head.

*wait until spring*

Air left my lungs as I contemplated my sanity. And the tone of the
still, quiet voice.

Five months later, daffodils were in bloom and college commencement
invitations sent out when a strange man laughingly sprayed me with a water hose
at a gas station.

Monday, October 24, 2011

This Massey is eleven years old and makes short work of a field of
soybeans. Our red Chevy truck is a ’73 model and the white International (not
pictured) is an old, gray bearded man to a mechanic. It was new in 1970, the
last of our shade tree, repair-them-ourselves vehicles.

We begin our sixth week of harvest on Tuesday. It’s been a smooth run
this year with little rain and no major breakdowns *cross fingers, knock on
wood, spit over left shoulder, conduct burnt offering ceremony*

This week – the good Lord willin’ and the creeks don’t rise -- we’ll
combine our last field of beans and put the equipment to bed.

Farming is business like any other. Difficult some days and life at its
best on others. Early mornings, late nights. No different from a mother rising
at 4 am to get the kids ready for school I think. Or the commuter braving a
traffic jam and snarly boss.

Tuesday, October 18, 2011

A farmer had five female pigs. Times were hard, so he took them to the county
fair to sell. At the fair, he met another farmer who owned five male pigs.
After talking a bit, they decided to mate the pigs and split everything 50/50.
But since the farmers lived sixty miles apart, they agreed to drive thirty
miles each, find an empty field, and let the pigs mate.

The first morning, the farmer with the female pigs got up at 5 A.M.,
loaded the pigs into the family station wagon, the only vehicle he had, and
drove the thirty miles.

"How will I know if they are pregnant?” he asked the other farmer.

"If they're lying in the grass in the morning, they're pregnant. If they're
in the mud, they're not.”

The next morning the pigs were rolling in the mud. So he hosed them off, loaded
them into the station wagon, and drove the thirty miles to the empty field to
try again.

This continued each morning for more than a week.

The next morning he was too tired to get out of bed.

"Honey,” the farmer said to his wife. “Please look outside and
tell me whether the pigs are in the mud or in the grass."

"Neither,” yelled his wife. "They're in the station wagon and one of
them is honking the horn."

Wednesday, September 28, 2011

Why a joke for the day? Because Blogger won't let me comment on Unicorn Bell and I have nothing else to give.

I had a problem with my
computer yesterday, so I called Eric, the 11 year old next door whose bedroom
looks like Mission Control and asked him to come over.
Eric clicked a couple of buttons and solved the problem.
As he was walking away, I called after him, “So, what was wrong?”
“It was an ID ten T error,” he said.
I didn't want to appear stupid, but nonetheless, “An, ‘ID ten T error’? What's that? In case I
need to fix it again.’
“Haven't you ever heard of an ‘ID ten T’ error before?” Eric asked. His smirk
was beginning to annoy me.
“No.”
“Write it down,” he said. “You’ll figure it out.'
So I wrote down.ID10T
I used to like Eric, the little bastard.

Tuesday, September 20, 2011

In past
decades, the definition of YA was The Catcher in the Rye, Bambi, To Kill a
Mockingbird, and Oliver Twist. Seriously, can you imagine kids reading one of
the above on their own without a school report looming? Well maybe Mockingbird
but what about the rest.

Animal
stories dominated the shelves as well as what is now labeled literary classics.

Black
Beauty, Irish Red, Misty of Chincoteague.

Adventures
of Huckleberry Finn, Great Expectations, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn.

Stories
about teenage drug dependences, graphic violence, and death almost
non-existent.

Alice in
Wonderland, Chronicles of Narnia, The Call of the Wild, The Black Stallion, Little House in the Big Woods.

But the kids
grew into adults and wanted more. They pushed the envelope on youth oriented
material. And their audience responded.

Aside from
any morality issues of teens exposed to TMI at an early age, some of today’s
books make me feel like a cat stroked backwards. Annoyed.

Many of the
books are carbon copies. I’m not talking about subject or content but prose.
First person, smart alec girl with a past who is kick ass at – fill in the
blank here. All of them talk the same with the similar vocabulary. Blech.

My pet
peeve, my problem, I reckon. I hate to see so-called ‘recipe’ type books. But writers
read a book, like it, and want to see more. Or (heaven help us) see a
profitable trend and want to cash in.

The YA
bookshelves are wide-open for any genre, full of promise and mayhem. But
golly people, give the Rose/Clary/Nora/Grace/Katniss spin offs a rest. We liked
them as a trickle. The flood? Eh, not so much.

Monday, September 12, 2011

Far be it
from me to get in the middle of this discussion but maybe a sidebar is in
order.

After
researching an agent and agency, employing hours and days of work, please Mr.
or Ms Agent let me know if you’ve received my query. It can be an auto-reply or
a rejection.

(At this
point in my writing career, if a rejection pinches my ego, I figure that is MY
problem not yours.)

Have a
website or a Publisher’s Marketplace page. This seems rudimentary but I see
this often. If you don’t market yourself, how can you market my manuscript?

Keep your
site updated. Come on, are you really so busy that you can’t take ten minutes
to post something more current than 2009?

List your
preferences. Again, this seems like a ‘duh’ but sadly it isn’t. Tell me exactly
what you do not want. This saves us both time and work.

If you are
not taking new clients and routinely deleting/shredding queries, please let me
know. Don’t coast.

I realize
you receive queries that don’t follow the rules and that you must wade through
the mucky ones to find the gems. But I’ve taken the time, Mr. or Mrs. Agent, to
research and read your submission guidelines line by line, Google all your
interviews, study your blog and website. Please respond in some fashion even if
it is with a ‘no’, a form letter, or an auto-response that you received the query.

Believe me, the phrase "no news is good news" is a horrible way to conduct business.

Tuesday, September 6, 2011

Want to run
a questionable fight scene through the ringer of fellow critters? Go to UnicornBell to submit your problem child for help.

Before I
compose a fight scene for my manuscript, I first map out the steps, the action,
and the weapons.

And I watch
Jackie Chan. A lot.

Videos, movie
and competition matches, play a large part in my research. Not so much car
chases though since they are mostly *ABC stuff. If you’ve seen one, you’ve seen
them all.

But let’s
set the record straight. The hands down, best fight sequences, best
car chase scenes (IMHO) are in The Bourne Ultimatum. That cop car, coasting
down the speed barrier is, well, I could watch it three times, re-wind, and
watch it again. Super.

Jackie Chan,
Bruce Lee (if you can find his stuff), are two of the best. I slo-mo the
action, note the placement of their feet especially and body.

The
defensive tactics I learned as a CO is invaluable; where to place the hands,
slapping the palm, and turning the thumb just so to release an opponent’s grip.

Use what you
have, take martial arts classes, watch videos. All this helps to visualize that
fight scene. Then your MC can pop open that can of ass whoopin’.

Again, if
you want to run that problem child of a fight scene past like-minded
individuals, go to Unicorn Bell and submit 250-300 word excerpt (with a
lead-in) to beccoff(at)nwmo(dot)net.

Monday, September 5, 2011

We call it
the Gathering, the fall migration of our barn swallows. They sit on the power
lines, sway in the breeze, and seem to count their numbers before leaving.

They’ve
abandoned their nests; the young have followed them into the sky. Now they wait
until everyone shows up.

Who is
missing? Are they counting heads? Or are they looking for the youngest to
strengthen? Do they wait on the weather?

They begin
their gather at the end of August, filling the lines until it curves down into
a half-smile.

We hurried
them along this year. When our barn began to lean, we knew its days were
numbered. Built in 1918, it had served its purpose and did not owe us a dime. Better
to put it down gently, lovingly than let it fall in pain, piece by piece.

We dropped
it and the barn swallows immediately began their Gathering.

Monday, August 29, 2011

Lemme tell ya, tonsillitis and reading a fantastic series of books just plain goes together. I know. I did it over this past week.

Before I get to the meat of my posting, one question; isn’t tonsillitis a kids malady?

But I digress.

Prick your ears my children on this bit of sweetness, the Iron Druid series by Kevin Hearne.

It begins with Hounded, continues with Hexed, and I just finished the third in the series, Hammered.

Everyone who aspires to sit beside published authors has acquired the irritating habit of ‘editing’ as they read books. I see wall-to-wall alliterations, bad grammar, overuse of pronouns, and think how the hell did this person get an agent let alone get published wonder if reading every new book will hit me this way.

I began Hounded and my editorial eye kicked in immediately. But nothing happened, no critiques exploded to kill my concentration. *whoa*

For me there are three kinds of books.

One, a book I immediately sling to one side and expand my mind by mowing the lawn instead.

Two, a book I like, dig in and devour. But muddled prose and unnecessary characters fill the pages and I begin skipping paragraphs then pages to get to the end. Usually I re-read them thoroughly.

Three, the last kind, the novel that I savor, roll over my senses, and absorb every word w/o skipping a word.

Not many books have had that effect on me. The King Chronicles by Patrick Rothfuss is one. Now, the Iron Druid series by Kevin Hearne is the second.

How good? I bought the series for my Kindle but now I must have them in book form. They are too good not to feel the paper under my fingers as I read.

And my tonsillitis is succumbing to pills I swallow twice daily. Of which I forgot to take because I was writing this. ACK.